Thursday, April 27, 2006

Microsoft misses?

First of all the market action was pretty volatile today. I looked at my screens in the morning and the Dow is down 60 points, what seemed like half an hour later the Dow was up 20%, then it even sold off later on in the day. What caused these wild fluctuations? Well it was two main stories.One is that China raised their interest rates.The other was Bernanke's comments about inflation.

In other news Microsoft's income rose 16%, but they missed estimates. Their revenue also came in below estimates. The title of this post has a question mark because Microsoft used to be notorious for "beating" estimates by a penny. Firms can do many things to increase their earnings per share and there was a long stretch where Microsoft would barely beat estimates. They would also use another tactic by talking about their guidance before they report. For instance, some analysts might throw out some numbers and Microsoft would say something like "well those are very optimistic numbers" blah blah blah. So analysts might take down their numbers a bit, but what do you know when MSFT reported their numbers were a bit higher than the analysts!Well not today, and MSFT is down about 6% in after-hours.

To somehow tie this post into my organization post from a few days ago, I saw a fairly cool gadget on Amazon that is basically a pen-scanner. So you scan the words and the pen saves it and uploads it to a computer. I read about these awhile ago, but forgot about them until today. I looked at a few and they might be a little buggy, but I might keep looking. This would definitely be a good way to keep track of information.